


The Lost Thaig

by PsuedoSudo



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon Compliant, Dwarven Fic, Flash Fic, Not for the faint of heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:28:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24220573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PsuedoSudo/pseuds/PsuedoSudo
Summary: When King Endrin Stonehammer closed Orzammar from the Deep Roads, he doomed the remaining dwarven cities Kal-Sharok, Hormack, and Gundar to be trapped with the darkspawn forever. With no access to the surface, and no access to each other, what were the last days like for the dwarves trapped in these cities?
Kudos: 3





	The Lost Thaig

The Ancestor Door straddled the width of the road and rose to the stony cavernous ceilings far above, and terminated there. It looked less like it had been built and installed, and more like it grew directly out of the natural stone wall, dwarven hands merely finishing what the stone around them had already started. The Ancestor Door was also carved with depictions on their history. Riha thought it was rather silly, but the Anscestor door must not be the only important door in their history, for this door had a lot of images of other doors carved into it.

Riha couldn’t usually come this close to the Door. This spot of road dipped lower than the rest of the city, and therefore closer to the ambient heat the lake of magma far below provided, and the igneous roads were noticeably warmer here than they were elsewhere. Because of this, the nugs had claimed it for their own, curling up in a heap like massive blind cats, and the Nug-Keepers usually left them to their rest. Riha might be able to convince the Nug-Keepers to let her play around them, but Thaig Eldest Dwogar watched from far above the city, and his word was law. 

For the past few days, though, the nugs were nowhere to be seen, and today Dwogar appeared to be missing on some other errand This was highly unusual, for she could not remember Dwogar ever appearing missing. She was sure he would turn up again soon, however, and in the meantime... no one could stop her from playing here, where the magma was practically spitting distance away. Which is exactly what she was doing, hosting a spitting contest with herself, except the goal wasn’t to spit the furthest, it was to spit straight down with the most amount of force and cause a bigger bubble and splash in the magma below. It was a very exciting game, exciting enough that her friends would not be able to resist joining her next time Dwogar was absent from his perch. 

“You ought to be careful with that, or you’ll burn your eyebrows off at the least.” Riha jumped a league into the air, and spun around. She expected to find Dwogar, as if she had summoned him with her thoughts along, only to find Garilid watching her instead. The heat from facing the magma lingered in her cheeks. 

“The magma is too far down to reach way up here.” Riha stated this firmly. 

“Not when you’re poking at it, like a dead man prods a sleeping bronto.”

Riha merely huffed at him.

“Come with me. Your parents say it is dinner time, and I have the honor of escorting you back so you do not get ‘ _lost’_ again.”

With one backward glance at the distant lake of magma, Riha quietly followed her elder back home. 

—————

Fire raged in the hearth in their dining room, warming the space and providing light simultaneously. Riha could hear her parents moving around and discussing something in the kitchen in hushed tones, which quickly fell silent as they entered. The dining table was conspicuously empty.

Riha was astounded to find out that after the long trek home, dinner was not quite finished. “I thought you said dinner was ready!”

“Not quite ready, although I might have let you play a bit longer if you hadn’t been by the Ancestor Door like you’re not supposed to be.” Riha ducked her head, though Garilid barely glanced at her when he said this. 

“I don’t know why I’m not supposed to be there, it’s just a giant door... covered in a bunch of carvings of smaller doors.” The words were barely out of her mouth, but as she looked at Garilid for a response, she already regretted it.

“Oh, you’re not familiar with that particular tale?” Garilid wasn’t the Thaig Eldest yet, but his eyes took on the same sharp glee she sometimes saw in Dwogar. 

“Gather around, and let me tell you the story of your ancestors.” Garilid said. The scent of roasting meat floated from the kitchen- or was it meat? Riha wasn’t sure, it didn’t smell like any nug she’d eaten before. As far as she knew, the only meat around here was nug, but perhaps something new and interesting had wandered into their village.

Regardless, she could not devour food which was not yet sitting on the dining table, so she slouched in her chair and resigned herself to listen to another one of Garilid’s tales.

“The dwarven people were once an empire. Our thaigs and Deep Roads would take months on bronto-back to cross from end to end. Thaigs were an interconnected ecosystem, each thaig with its own specialties and prized goods and rulers. ” Garilid’s eyes were faraway, drifting through empty air in front of him. 

Riha nodded solemnly, for she’d heard this part before. Riha had never seen the Deep Roads herself, but she figured they were something like the roads within the Thaig, only perhaps _deeper_ or something? The distinction was never clarified. 

Suddenly, Garilid’s eyes met hers and they gleamed with excitement better fitting a man 20 years younger. “Gold and gemstones and lyrium flowed through our mines like water, and our thaig in particular crafted some of the best metalwork ever seen. It’s quite astonishing what a good smith can accomplish when his mine sits on top of a constantly running river of magma. The great city of Orzammar was paved with gold, every wall and lamppost gilded with rubies. It was truly a marvel.” Riha tried to imagine the blackened lava-rock of her own city gilded with gold and gemstones. It didn’t look right in her mind’s eye.

Garilid sighed, and then glanced around himself, and rested one hand on his beard. “Our empire was large, yes... but it did not expand to every corner of the world. From out of tunnels left unexplored or gaps in our roadways, emerged the darkspawn.” He stopped as if attempting to seek out the right words, and gently smoothed his beard braids down. It did nothing to soothe the small, gray frizzy hairs which stuck out of it.

“It is not known exactly what the darkspawn are. Some of them look like us if you were very far away and were mostly blind, with stout bodies and broad shoulders. But where a dwarf’s skin might be pale like a nug, or closer to the earthy tones in the stone, a darkspawn is gray and green, like a fatally infected wound. Some have hair black as pitch, but most are bald with only a few matted tufts here and there. Their bodies are covered in pustules, flesh sloughing off–” Garilid blinked, and then shook his head sharply. 

Riha’s eyes were wide with curiosity, but curiosity was where it ended it seemed. The Ancestors would not help him if Riha’s parents skinned him alive for traumatizing her. Garilid exhaled, and began again. 

“At first they came few at a time, and were easy to vanquish. The mighty dwarven empire did not get to be mighty without mighty arms, you see.” With this, Garilid lifted his own arms and flexed dramatically, and Riha laughed and imitated the motion. 

“But even with our might, the darkspawn force only grew. Where one died, two more would replace it the next day. What the darkspawn lacked in intelligence, they made up for with sheer numbers. Many dwarven soldiers lost their lives in the Deep Roads, and a great many of those soldiers were never able to have a proper burial and return to the stone.”

Garilid glanced back at her. When she was younger, she didn’t grasp the seriousness of those deaths, and what it was to not return to the stone. Now however, a small inkling of understanding hovered in the back of her eyes. It made him proud, and simultaneously broke his heart to see her slowly growing up.

“Our thaig had an advantage, however. In case our magma river flooded the thaig, we needed a way to isolate it from the Deep Roads and keep it from spreading. So, a great door was built at the entrance to our thaig, to prevent magma from flooding the Deep Roads in the event of an eruption. Luckily, this great door had more than one benefit.”

“It is the Ancestor Door which protected us from darkspawn raids, because powerful as the darkspawn can be, they are not usually more powerful than magma, and thus couldn’t break through into the thaig.”

“After hundreds of years of darkspawn attacks, and the conclusion of their first blight up the world, only 4 thiags were left standing. The great capital city of Orzammar, Kal-Sharok, Hormack, and Gundar were all that remained of our empire. Only Orzammar had access to the surface, and the materials the surfacers provided, which were keeping the dwarven cities alive.”

“Who were the surfacers?”

“A story for another day, child.” Riha frowned at him, but otherwise said nothing. 

“King Endrin Stonehammer evaluated his options, and chose to save Orzammar, even if it meant dooming the rest. He sealed the entrances to the deep roads, cutting off the remaining cities from all trade lines, and dooming them to die a slow death to the darkspawn.”

Riha was silent. Garilid couldn’t gauge how well she grasped the truth of this, but he supposed it didn’t matter. Eventually, when she grew older and could see their community suffer more and more with each passing decade, she would. 

“And that, my child, is what the Ancestor Door depicts, and why we would prefer you not to go near it.”

Riha frowned at him. “But if it’s so strong it keeps the darkspawn out, it’s safe, isn’t it?”

“Everything is safe, until the day that it isn’t. Do not argue.”

Riha’s parents, who had been waiting patiently in the kitchen for Garilid to finish his tale, finally entered with platters of roasted... well, roasted meat. He only glanced at it for a second before deliberately turning his face away.

“I think I will take that as my cue to head to my own home.”

Riha’s parents insisted he stay for dinner, but he waved them off. “Time spent together at this age is precious, do not waste it on me.”

As Garilid stepped out of the Rahi’s family house, his eyes landed on the back of the Door, and the empty spot where the nugs typically slept in large piles and soaked up the ambient heat that drifted upwards from the lake of magma below. 

Soon, the Door was out of sight as Garilid travelled to his own home. The streets and buildings were made of black and orange stone, carved directly from the surrounding igneous rock. Where the roads were worn smooth by thousands of years of dwarven feet traversing these streets, the walls retained natural pores from remembered gas. 

Before he ate and slept for the night, Garilid whispered a soft prayer of thanks to Dwogar for agreeing to never be returned to the stone so that their dwindling community might stave off starvation just a little bit longer. 

Wherever the dwarves went when they couldn’t be returned to the stone, Garilid would see his dear friend Dwogar soon.


End file.
